In Pictures: 8 real-world Big Data deployments

Vestas Wind Energy Turbine Placement and Maintenance

Danish firm Vestas uses supercomputers and a big data modeling solution to pinpoint the optimal location for its wind turbines to maximize power generation and reduce energy cost. It uses a wind library that incorporates data from global weather systems with data collected from its existing turbines. The wind library currently holds nearly 2.8 Petabytes of data. Current parameters include temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, precipitation, wind direction and velocity from the ground level up to 300 feet, and the company's recorded historical data. Vestas plans to add global deforestation metrics, satellite images, historical metrics, geospatial data and data on phases of the moon and tides.